Helping travelers with hidden disabilities explore the world

Quiet Transformations

Last weekend I listened to more than two dozen tales of transformative travel experiences. Mostly by manly men who’d been transformed by that time they’d climbed Mt. Bleakness in Uglistan and had a great experience speaking six words of Arabic with the locals at the mountaintop 7-11.

As a disabled female traveler, I’m probably never going to get to climb anything in a country with a name ending in -istan.

Does this mean that my disability cuts deeper than the chronic pelvic pain? Can I never be a top travel writer, or a true voyager, because I can’t hike twenty miles a day through the windswept sands, barefoot, uphill through the snow both ways?

No, dammit.

Today a friend uttered a phrase, and I fell in love:

Quiet transformations

That is what I want to write about–all those less glamorous but equally wonderful things I can see and learn and do without needing a perfect body.* Which encompasses everything from examining the art in the Louvre from its many comfy seats to walking through almost-new rocks in Mt. Lassen’s Devestated Area.

*Hm–there’s another interesting little phrase. More on that on another day…